5 Ways for Your Tech Startup to Stand Out without Spending a Fortune

Setting up a startup and building a tech brand is a huge challenge. There have been lucrative exits of startups in recent years. According to sources, 75% of start-ups fail to survive.

So, how do you make sure that your startup never suffers the same fate? Here are five ways to increase your chances of survival, and ensure growth for your business.

Passionate leadership

Most successful startup businesses have a very passionate leader that runs them. Passion matters because it is the fuel that will keep you going through challenging situations. It is what will keep you stable on track when things go wrong. 

At first, you have an idea. Next, you must be passionate about your idea. If you start a business without being passionate about it, you will never be successful to see it through.

Founders of successful startups started creating solutions to a problem they are passionate about, and focused their heart and soul on it.

According to Steve Jobs, startup founders should be burning with an idea or a wrong that they can right, adding that anyone who lacks passion will not succeed. 

Here are more reasons why being passionate is important to your business: 

• Customers and employees appreciate leaders with passion. – You must show your passion to employees and customers. It will help convince them to back and uphold your business’s vision.

• Passion drives perseverance – There is no shortcut to success. You must persevere through several days and nights of planning and scheming until your hard work pays off. 

• Being passionate will help you attract funders – You are likely to attract investors if you show them that you have passion for your idea. 

• Passion wins over the fear of failure – Passionate entrepreneurs realize that the fear of failure is real. However, they do not allow it to rule over them or block their vision of success. 

Avoid spending money on marketing strategies that do not work

For instance, do not spend money on ads without having a well-defined strategy for your branding. It will be a waste of time and money. 

In the old days, businesses were told that marketing begins with knowing and understanding customers. Today, successful marketing begins with knowing your customer segment. 

Customer segmentation is the process by which you separate your target audience into groups with similar characteristics. This will help you create highly-personalized campaigns and get, in return, higher ROI and revenue. 

Customer segmentation helps brands to convey their message in highly-local and precise terms, allowing them to target specific groups, depending on their unique circumstances. 

Splitting your audience this way brings many benefits to your startup, including: 

• Improvement in campaign performance 

That is because it allows you to target the right people with the right message at the right time. Tailor your message based on your audience’s preferences and needs. 

• Inform your product development

Market segmentation can also guide your business on how to develop products that meet the needs of your customers. You can create different products tailored to different segments of your customer base.

• Reveals areas for expansion

With a segmented approach in marketing, you can identify groups of people your tech marketing efforts have not yet reached out to. You can then expand your business into these new market segments.

Having a clear brand DNA or identity is a must for every tech business. Branding is the process of defining and showing who you are as a business. On the other hand, effective marketing is a way for businesses to amplify their message to the right people at the right place and time. 

Branding is one of the biggest and sometimes the most important part of a marketing platform or design. It is the component that makes name-brand items distinct from generic brands.

Why do people say “Google it” rather than “use a search engine”? It is because they have associated the word “Google” with the activity of searching for information online. The same thing applies when people say, “can I have a Kleenex?” rather than just saying “give me a facial tissue.” 

These are examples of results of effective branding. The goal is to be distinguished in your niche or industry. You wish that your brand will be the definition of similar tech products on the market, just like the way Google or Kleenex did. 

Also, branding goes farther than just creating a nice logo or building a good name. Every customer experience your target audience will get when interacting with your brand also falls under the category of branding. 

Branding is important in several ways, including: 

• It makes a brand different from others. 

• It helps businesses gain customer trust and loyalty. 

• It helps businesses convey their personality. 

To know more about effective branding and creating a strong brand presence in the tech market, access a free branding toolkit here. 

Allocate your marketing budget wisely

Below are best practices for proper marketing budget allocation. 

• Spend your marketing budget based on where your audience is – Create the ideal customer persona of your tech business and know the places where you can engage with your target audience. 

• Diversify your marketing strategy – This means investing in multiple campaigns and seeing which ones work and which ones do not. It can prevent you from further spending on marketing campaigns that do not generate results. 

• Leverage data – This strategy is so useful that you can use it in many parts of your campaign, such as planning and tracking the progress of your marketing campaign. 

Data will also show you which strategies are not generating results, so you will not use those techniques again and not waste money on them again. 

Engage only with the right audience

Your target audience is the group of people who are highly likely to buy your products or services, and therefore are also the people who will be interested to see your campaign ads.

The right audience for your tech business may be based on location, interest, business operations, and several other factors or characteristics.  If you run a software development company, your target audience may be people and companies that need the SaaS products or services you are developing.

If you need expert advice in any of the aspects mentioned above, call Yura, a tech branding agency that specializes in helping businesses in the tech industry. 

If you can partner with Yura for a marketing scale-up, you will have good chances of surviving and growing your business, while having affordable costs for the service.